VoIP & Gadgets Blog

CloudTC and N-Able Acquired

By Peter on Wednesday, May 22

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...

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Tagged hosted pbx, itexpo, mergers, phone system, RMM

ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 22

In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...

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Tagged amazon, cloud computing, data center, ec2, infiniband, interop, profitbricks, public cloud, technology

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 20

By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent

Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.

When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.

The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.

Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.

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Tagged Alcatel-Lucent, big data, customer care, KPIs, network monitoring, procativecare | Responses

10 Lessons from Volleyball

By Peter on Monday, May 20

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...

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Tagged hiring, strategy, volleyball

Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...

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Tagged emerging threats, interop, malware, security

NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...

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Tagged bss, carrier, ericsson, huawei, interoperability, nfv, nokia siemens networks, nsn, oss, sdn, software telco

SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market

By Rich Tehrani on Thursday, May 16

Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...

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Tagged help desk, itsm, mdm, sysaid

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VoIP via power lines

August 17, 2004

First came voice over copper and for a over one hundred years voice was carried over copper. Then came wireless which allowed car phones and cell phones to flourish. Next, came the Internet and we had Voice over the Internet aka Voice over IP (VoIP) over dial-up (ex: VocalTec's Internet Phone, Microsoft Netmeeting). Next came broadband and much improved VoIP offerings from Vonage and other players using ATA devices such as the Cisco ATA-186 and now Sipura.

Posted in VoIP

Tagged: electric, power, voip : Related Tags: power lines, voice internet, voice power, internet protocol, voice, internet

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Pingtel drops hardware and goes all open source

August 17, 2004

It was only a matter of time before Pingtel switched to a completely 100% software company. (See: Pingtel Completes Strategic Transition with Sale of Its Award-Winning xpressa Desktop Phone Product Line)

First, let me state that I've always loved Pingtel's VoIP phones which include a very cool LCD display with the ability to run Java applets. In fact, their vision was that users could access the phonebook on the LCD display, lookup a local pizzeria, and even be "pushed" a coupon for a discount or special.

But the high pricetag on the Pingtel phones as well as competition from Cisco and other VoIP phones that also often had LCD displays took some of the competitive advantage away from Pingtel.

Posted in Reviews, VoIP

Tagged: asterisk, ip-pbx, open-source, pingtel, pingtel asterisk ip-pbx open-source : Related Tags: competitor asterisk, pingtel, source, asterisk, phones

Windows XP SP2, Skype and Limiting the number of connections

August 16, 2004

VoIP Forum and other Technology Forums: Windows XP SP2, Skype, eMule
I posted this in the VoIP forums and thought it would be useful to blog it as well:

I've noticed some problems with the number of simultaneous connections after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).

Apparently, as a security measure, Microsoft has limited the number of simultaneous connections to 10 to reduce the spread of viruses such as MSBlast.

As a side effect, this has slowed down many eMule users and I've noticed some issues with my Skype client.

Well, I found a patch for it! It patches the new TCPIP.SYS file in the C:\Windows\system32\drivers directory. It does a simple change to the hex value 10 in the file. more...

Posted in Technology and Science

Tagged: forum, skype, sp2, voip : Related Tags: simultaneous connections, number simultaneous, windows, connections, skype, patch

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Hawking cracks black hole paradox

August 13, 2004

Very interesting...

From newscientist.com
Hawking cracks black hole paradox
"After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox."

For the full story, check out the link:
Hawking cracks black hole paradox | New Scientist

Posted in Technology and Science

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AT&T CallVantage VoIP calls blocked

August 12, 2004

Some VoIP calls being blocked | CNET News.com

Cnet.com has reported that some users are having issue receiving inbound calls. This has once again raised the issue of whether or not cable broadband companies are blocking VoIP calls.

I discussed the potential for network service providers to block VoIP traffic in my Vonage Outage Part 2 blog entry. Damn hypercompetive bastards!

Posted in VoIP

Tagged: at&t, at&t voip callvantage voip, callvantage, voip : Related Tags: inbound calls, msblast virus, calls, issue, system, blocking

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Playing chicken installing Microsoft Windows XP SP2

August 12, 2004

A few fellow co-workers that all work in IT played a game of "chicken" yesterday. That is, we were trying to figure out who would be the guinea pig to install the Microsoft Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2). The conversation went something like this.
"You install SP2."
"No, you"
"Uhh, no.

Posted in Technology and Science

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Blocking attachments in Outlook Express

August 11, 2004

After my little episode of having my home PC infected by my wife with the Bagle virus I thought I would look into some freeware/shareware utilities that remove untrustworthy attachments (i.e. .exe, .com, .pif, .bat, .vbs, etc.) from Outlook Express. (Note: I had the latest anti-virus definitions installed, but the virus writers are always a step ahead, so best to just block certain file types if at all possible)

I found one shareware called Outlook Express Quick Tools (OE Quick Tools for short) for $29.95 that lets you remove attachments, but it's unclear if you have to manually remove them or not. I think iit just removes attachments of all kinds just to reduce the size of your Outlook Express database.

Posted in Technology and Science

Tagged: attachments, blocking : Related Tags: outlook express, windows windows, block certain, files outlook, windows vista, outlook

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VoIP2Save.com "We have Number Portability - Our Competitors Do Not!"

August 10, 2004

VoIP2Save.com "We have Number Portability - Our Competitors Do Not!"
Na na na na!

Well they weren't actually quoted saying it like that, but pretty damn close! : )

I just saw this release hit the wire:
PRESS RELEASE: Broadband Internet Phone Company, VoIP2Save.com Announces Full Phone Number Portability

The release claims that Vonage, Packet8, Voice Glo, Lingo and I-Connect do not allow customers to keep their phone number the company assigned to them, if the customer decided to switch to another phone company. I know I have heard complaints from users when they tried porting their phone number when switching from one broadband VoIP service provider to another.

Posted in VoIP

Snom's new 220 VoIP phone

August 10, 2004

I am a fan of the Snom VoIP phones, TMC Labs reviewed a couple Snom phones recently and were pretty impressed. (Snom 100 and 200 product review)

so I thought I would share their press release announcing their new 220 phone which features a 128 X 64 pixel graphical backlit display:

Berlin, 2004-08-10: snom technology, situated in Berlin, is expanding its VoIP phones business line with the new IP phone snom 220, which has been specially developed for the small and medium-sized enterprise segment. This high-end affordable device addresses the communication needs of power users such as executive and administrative staff who require very high standards from communication systems.

Convenience is guaranteed by the 128 x 64 pixel graphical backlit display.

Posted in VoIP

Tagged: snom : Related Tags: graphical backlit, backlit display, language support, pixel graphical, support, phone

AT&T the Sleeping Giant Awakens to blitzkrieg the VoIP market

August 10, 2004

So every industry pundit is claiming that AT&T has surrendered to the Baby Bells, but I know better.

Here are some headlines:
AT&T surrenders fight for home telephone services
AT&T Gives Up on Consumer Market
AT&T rings in a new business strategy

"AT&T last month said that it would stop promoting its local and long-distance services to consumers, marking the end of an era for the company that once served virtually every U.S. home. AT&T plans to focus exclusively on big business customers, which account for 75% of overall revenue.

Posted in VoIP

Tagged: at&t, at&t callvantage voip broadband service vonage packet8 lingo, broadband, callvantage, lingo, packet8, service, voip, vonage : Related Tags: weeks switch, cable connection, internet connection, modem router, definitely culprit, service

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